This is a story about how I often take the more complicated route when trying to achieve an otherwise simple goal.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about an authentic retro 80s boombox that I got from my grandparents' basement. I thought it would be fun to record a bunch of albums onto cassette just for the novelty of it, so the first thing I did was look at what kind of audio input plugs it had. I found out that the only kind it supported was this weird thing called DIN which basically looked like a larger S-Video plug except it had 5 pins. I did a little research on this mysterious 5-pin DIN audio cable, and I found out that it's an old German standard that I guess has been long abandoned in North America, except used rarely for some brands of keyboards (the instrument, not the computer kind).

I figured my only option at this point was to find some kind of 5-pin DIN to RCA or 3.5mm adapter much like this one. I checked the obvious retailers, Best Buy, The Source, but nobody had the adapter I needed. My next stop was eBay. There were a small handful of people selling them, but all at ridiculous prices. After some searching, I actually found somebody from The Republic of Cyprus that was selling the exact adapter I needed, and for a reasonable price. I bought it, and it came to about $12 CAD after shipping. Then I waited.

Finally, yesterday, it arrived. I immediately ran upstairs to see if it worked. I set the tape deck to line-in mode, connected my Zune, and turned up the volume. I heard music. It was awesome. I grabbed one of the blank tapes that I had nearby, put it in, and pressed record. After about 30 seconds I pressed stop, rewound the tape and pressed play to see if it worked. Silence.

My only guess was that the line-in mode is meant to be used as kind of an auxiliary system, so you can use the speakers with another audio device... But it doesn't actually let you record using it. So then I was back at square one. Today at work, though, I was reminded about a relatively simple and common piece of technology that could help me. A tape adapter.

It was so simple, I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before. I've used tape adapters since I got my own portable CD player back in '95 or '96, but instead of this simple solution, I decided to order some archaic cable adapter on eBay from The Republic of Cyprus. So on my way home from the dentist today, I stopped and picked up a cheap tape adapter from Zellers for ten dollars (I had to laugh when the packaging said "compatible with iPods"... Oh, marketing). When I got home, I set everything up again, this time my Zune hooked up to the tape adapter which was inserted in the first tape deck, along with a blank tape inserted in the second deck. I pressed record and waited. After a few seconds I rewound the tape to give it a test. This time I heard music.

All this trouble was for nothing, though, because I'm assuming since the unit itself is so old, parts have been worn out and things don't move quite as smoothly as they used to. As a result, anything I play back in the deck ends up sounding just ever-so-slightly too slow. There is also a significant amount of distortion that can be heard on the tape, which pretty much destroys any enjoyment you can possibly get out of listening to music. On the plus side, I do now have a cable that lets me hook up my Zune or any other audio device so I can listen to it through the unit's speakers. The radio works pretty good, too. Now I just don't know what to do with 10 blank cassette tapes and a tape adapter.

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